Labour accused of ‘hammering' Scots during first year in office
On the first anniversary of Sir Keir Starmer 's election win, the Scottish Conservatives said it had been marked by a string of 'broken promises and U-turns' that had hit hard-working Scots in the pocket.
The Scottish Tories said a decision to end universal winter fuel payments for pensioners was 'another broken election pledge and a betrayal of some of our most vulnerable people, one which the SNP shamefully copied in Scotland'.
The party pointed to a rise in employers' National Insurance contributions which it claimed had triggered job losses, as well as pay freezes for staff and higher prices for customers.
It said inheritance tax rises had 'devastated' farming communities and that Labour's 'hostility' to North Sea oil and gas projects had caused job losses in the north-east of Scotland and higher energy bills.
Rachael Hamilton, the Scottish Conservative deputy leader, said Scotland and the UK 'can't afford another four years of a Prime Minister who is hopelessly out of his depth'.
She added: 'Keir Starmer's first year in office has been a catastrophic series of broken promises and U-turns that people up and down the country are paying for. Labour's jobs tax and family farm tax have been utterly devastating for the careers, pay packets and bills of ordinary people.
'Their hostility to North Sea oil and gas is not just crushing livelihoods and communities across the north-east, it's leading to higher fuel bills for everyone by making us more reliant on foreign imports.
'Starmer has betrayed all those who voted for him by breaking his vow not to raise taxes – and he'll have to hike them again in the autumn after his humiliating surrender to Labour MPs on welfare reform.'
Labour won an overwhelming majority on July 4 last year, but Sir Keir's approval ratings have since fallen dramatically, while a number of surveys now put Reform UK ahead of the party in Scotland.
Ian Murray, the Scottish Secretary, said millions of Scots were better off since Labour came to power.
He pointed to rises to the minimum wage worth up to £1,400 a year to low-paid Scots, the introduction of the right to sick and parental leave from day one of a job, and the extension of fuel duty cuts for drivers.
Mr Murray said the UK Government had given Holyrood a record settlement of £50 billion, with at least £14 billion in extra funding by 2029 when compared to Tory spending plans.
He also took aim at the SNP, arguing that while NHS waiting lists have fallen in England, the Scottish health system 'remains under SNP mismanagement' with one in six Scots on an NHS waiting list and cancer waiting times 'at their worst ever level'.
Stephen Flynn, the SNP Westminster leader, pointed to Labour U-turns on the winter fuel payment and welfare cuts while criticising Sir Keir's record on the economy.
'Voters were promised a new direction but instead they got more of the same Westminster cuts and failure,' he said.
'When people look back on the Labour Party's year in office they will remember the cuts to disabled people and pensioners' winter fuel payments, the betrayal of Waspi women and children in poverty, rising energy bills and food prices, and a Prime Minister who took thousands of pounds of designer clothes and freebies while imposing austerity cuts on the rest of us.'
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BBC News
14 minutes ago
- BBC News
Payout offered to Afghans hit by UK data breaches
Afghan nationals whose personal information was mistakenly exposed by the Ministry of Defence in 2021 will be offered up to £4,000 each in compensation, the government has said. The data breaches affected 277 people, some of whom had worked for the UK government and were in hiding from insurgent Taliban forces at the Minister Luke Pollard said he could not "undo past mistakes" but promised that the payments would be made "as quickly as reasonably practical". The government expects the total cost to be around £1.6m and comes on top of the £350,000 it had to pay after receiving a fine from the data watchdog. The biggest breach took place in September 2021 when the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (Arap) team was working to evacuate people from Afghanistan following the chaotic withdrawal of western troops.A mass email was sent to those, such as interpreters, whose work with the UK government meant they could be targeted by the Taliban and therefore made them eligible to be relocated. Their email addresses were added to the 'To' field instead of the 'blind carbon copy' (Bcc) section, meaning their names could be seen by all Ministry of Defence later launched an internal investigation that revealed two similar breaches on 7 September and 13 September of that Humber from the Leigh Day law firm which is representing some of those affected said the government's statement about compensation contained "little information"."As far as we are aware, there has been no consultation with those affected or their legal advisors about the scheme - it is not clear the criteria that will be used to identify the proposed payment amount."In our client's case, he and his family spent five very scared months in hiding in Kabul concerned that the Taliban were now aware that he had assisted UK forces and were looking for him. "He feared for his life and was aware of the Taliban beating and killing others that had assisted UK forces. "We will need to review critically with our client whether any sum that is now being offered adequately compensates him for distress that he has undoubtedly suffered." After investigating the breaches in 2023, information commissioner John Edwards said the error could have led to a "threat to life" and had "let down those to whom our country owes so much".The commissioner initially fined the government £1m but that was reduced to £700,000 in recognition of the measures taken by the Ministry of Defence to report the incident, limit its impact and the difficulties of the situation for teams handling the relocation of was further reduced to £350,000 as part of a change in approach by the watchdog to public sector fines. Announcing the compensation payouts in a statement on Friday, Pollard said his department would "drive improvement in the department's data handling training and practices".Earlier this week, the government announced that the Arap scheme was closing to new applicants, having resettled 21,316 Afghans in the half of those brought to the UK were children, and a quarter were women. A Home Office paper published on Tuesday said Defence Secretary John Healey believed the scheme had "fulfilled its original purpose".It said the scheme could now be shut down "not least so that defence efforts and resources can be focused where they are most needed - on our nation's security, to combat the acute threats and destabilising behaviour of our adversaries".
The Guardian
15 minutes ago
- The Guardian
To Starmer, his achievements are obvious. As a thought experiment, let's see things through his eyes
He doesn't look like the innovative type, but Keir Starmer is staging a radical experiment. He is testing out a theory of politics a matter of months after it was seemingly – and spectacularly – disproved and, in the process, hoping to pull off a turnaround that would constitute a comeback so stunning it would be closer to a resurrection. The theory in question is that if you deliver practical improvements to the lives of voters, they will reward you at the ballot box. Its guiding principle is 'show, don't tell', with the emphasis on results rather than talk, pragmatism rather than ideology. He's not the first to try it: this was also the animating creed of Joe Biden's presidency – and we know how that worked out. So far the approach seems to be bearing similarly sour fruit in Britain. As Starmer marks one year since his landslide victory, Labour has suffered the biggest post-election drop in public approval since the Conservatives were tanked by Black Wednesday in 1992. The prime minister's personal numbers are the lowest ever recorded for a PM 12 months in: his net approval stands at -54 points. At the equivalent moment in October 2023, Rishi Sunak scored -37. No one has ever come back up from such depths. The PM appears unfazed by all this. It's not that he insists he knows how to climb out of the current hole; rather, he refuses to accept he or his government are in a hole at all. He has a list of first-year achievements he is proud of and, besides, he believes he was written off once before, early in his spell as leader of the opposition – only to plough on, methodically reaching each of the milestones he had set himself and, finally, to win. By way of an anniversary gift, let's assess Starmer as he wants to be assessed. Let's put aside the various missteps of the past year as 'noises off', or as the mere teething pains of a new government. Let us look past both the fiasco of this week's near-defeat on welfare, staved off only by a series of panicked concessions and U-turns, and last summer's baffling determination to strangle at birth any feelgood factor that may have greeted the ejection of a despised Tory government, filling the air instead with gloom and the promise that things would get worse before they got better. Let's not dwell on the one act of these past 12 months that cut through most to voters: the withdrawal of the winter fuel allowance from millions of pensioners. Let us instead judge Labour on its own terms: delivery. On that list of Starmer's, there's a decent range of items, from the three trade deals that had eluded the Conservatives – with the US, EU and India – to a fall in NHS waiting lists, down to their lowest level in two years; from the expansion of free school meals provision to increased wages. The trouble is, none of those achievements goes anywhere close to repairing the damage Labour itself says was done over the past decade and a half. Inside Downing Street, they still profess their shock at the state they found the country in. Whether it's overcrowded prisons or a dysfunctional water industry, so much is 'busted'. It is a herculean task to turn all that around, and especially to do it fast – all the more so when there is so little money to spend. Starmer might be calm about the fact that a great change hasn't happened within a year, but it requires a Panglossian optimism to believe it will come even within five, in time for the next election. In whichever direction you look, delivery is maddeningly hard. To take just one example, the government has won plaudits for its first moves on housing, including a target of an additional 1.5m homes in England by 2029. That means building 300,000 each year. But for the most recent 12-month period, the tally stood at just over 200,000. If everything goes right, Labour's planning reforms should eventually boost housebuilding by 25% – but that still won't be enough to reach its goal. Still, let's be like Starmer and hope his various plans work and the government really does deliver. The lesson of Biden is that even that won't be enough. In fairness, Labour's high command does get that point, acknowledging mere 'lines on a graph' or stats won't cut it. The improvement has to be felt in people's lives. And yet, that too may not be sufficient. Voters don't usually go in for gratitude; they are as likely to credit themselves as the government for a material advance in their circumstances. What's needed, and Team Starmer swear they understand this too, is a story, a narrative of where the country has been and where it could go next, that the public can follow. Land on the right one, and it gives you the time and space this government has been denied. Margaret Thatcher's self-proclaimed mission to wean Britain off a sclerotic state was compelling enough to make a virtue even of economic hardship: the bitterness of her medicine was deemed proof that it was working. With no equivalent story, every setback of Starmer's is taken in isolation, evidence that the government doesn't know what it's doing. The PM offers no persuasive explanation of what is happening or why it may take a while. That wrecks a party's relationship with the electorate, obviously, but also with its own MPs, as the increasingly restive and frustrated parliamentary Labour party attests. Most Labour folk admit this narrative weakness is their achilles heel, and that it stems from a deficiency in the leader himself. A lawyer, a technocrat, a manager: whatever word they use to describe the prime minister, no one ever accuses him of being a storyteller. The man who seems least worried by this narrative void is Starmer himself. The formative experience of his (short) political career was his early tenure as Labour leader, half a decade ago. Trailing far behind his then opponent, he read commentaries daily telling him that Boris Johnson was going to dominate British politics for the next 10 years and that his destiny was to replicate Neil Kinnock as a transitional figure, preparing the ground for someone else more capable of winning. Those prognosticators got him wrong then and, he believes, they have got him wrong now. Besides, in his mind, the narrative of his government is obvious. How could anyone look at all he has done so far and not see that the common thread is an earnest effort to improve the lives of ordinary working men and women? To him, it's so clear it scarcely needs to be spelled out. Unfortunately, as the last US president discovered, everything needs to be spelled out, a hundred times a day, on every conceivable platform and very loudly. The days of quiet, patient, unflashy achievement, eventually recognised by a grateful electorate, are long gone, if they ever existed. Starmer and those around him need to adapt to that reality soon. If he fails, there is a grinning master of the new politics, who revels in the primacy of talk over action, of grievance over solution, who is currently 10 points ahead – and waiting to pounce. Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
The Independent
18 minutes ago
- The Independent
Stocks fade as tariff deadline looms large
London's FTSE 100 ended flat as tariff worries kept enthusiasm to a minimum on Friday, while the pound edged slightly lower after a dramatic week in Westminster. The FTSE 100 index lost just 0.29 points at 8,822.91. The FTSE 250 ended down 145.24 points, 0.7%, at 21,557.34, and the AIM All-Share closed down 2.76 points, 0.4%, at 773.49. For the week, the FTSE 100 added 0.3%, though the FTSE 250 shed 0.7%. The AIM All-Share added 0.5%. In European equities on Friday, the CAC 40 in Paris ended down 0.8%, while the DAX 40 in Frankfurt fell 0.6%. US financial markets are closed on Friday for Independence Day. US President Donald Trump said he plans to start sending letters informing trading partners of their tariff rates as soon as Friday, as negotiations to avoid higher US levies enter the final stretch. 'My inclination is to send a letter out and say what tariff they're going to be paying,' he told reporters on Thursday. 'It's just much easier.' He added: 'We're going to be sending some letters out, starting probably (Friday).' IG analyst Chris Beauchamp commented: 'Without interest from US traders European markets have found it hard to sustain the positive momentum seen yesterday. The optimism seen in the wake of payrolls and the passage of Trump's tax bill dissipated as tariff worries resurfaced ahead of next week's deadline, leaving the Dax and others in the red. 'The UK's separation from the EU meant that it was spared any downside today, the index holding on flat for the day. As one of the few countries to have successfully negotiated a 'trade deal' with the US this means UK investors don't have to worry about this problem. Unfortunately, the slow-burn crisis in UK government spending means they will have their hands full anyway.' The pound was down at 1.3640 dollars on Friday in London, from 1.3654 dollars at the equities close on Thursday. The euro stood higher at 1.1780 dollars, against 1.1762 dollars. Against the yen, the dollar was trading higher at 144.53 yen compared to 144.87 yen. Sterling had fallen below the 1.36 dollar mark earlier this week. Sir Keir Starmer said he has a good relationship with Mr Trump because they both 'care about family'. The Prime Minister told the BBC Radio 4 podcast Political Thinking With Nick Robinson it was 'in the national interest' for the two men to connect. He said: 'We are different people and we've got different political backgrounds and leanings, but we do have a good relationship and that comes from a number of places. Sir Keir also backed Rachel Reeves and said she would be chancellor 'for a very long time to come', after the politician was visibly tearful in the House of Commons on Wednesday following a U-turn to welfare reform plans that put an almost £5 billion black hole in her plans. AJ Bell analyst Dan Coatsworth commented: 'After the drama around Rachel Reeves's position as chancellor and a temporary wobble on bond and currency markets earlier this week, there was a welcome period of calm. The 10-year gilt rate is nearly back to the 4.5% level at which it started the week.' Despite the calmer day on bond markets, the interest rate-sensitive housebuilding sector struggled in London. Barratt Redrow fell 2.6%, while Berkeley Group shed 2.4%. A profit warning from MJ Gleeson hurt shares in housebuilders. It warned pre-tax profit in financial 2026 will be at the lower end of current market expectations, its second disappointing trading update in a month. MJ Gleeson said the UK housing market 'lacks confidence and remains subdued and the board does not see a short-term catalyst for any substantial improvement'. Continuing capacity issues in the UK planning system have delayed site openings and Gleeson Homes will operate from fewer sites than anticipated in the current year, the firm said. Overall, the company expects pre-tax profit before exceptional items for the financial year to June 2026 to be at or around £24.5 million, the lower end of current market expectations, and below Bloomberg consensus of £26.2 million. MJ Gleeson shares fell 6.7%. Helping support the FTSE 100 were stocks in more defensive sectors. Drugmaker AstraZeneca added 1.3%, while utility British Gas owner Centrica added 0.9%. Elsewhere in London, Moonpig lost 8.7%. Deutsche Bank cut the online greeting card and gifting company to 'hold' from 'buy'. The biggest risers on the FTSE 100 were Vodafone, up 2.4p at 81.6p, Fresnillo, up 35p at 1,495p, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners PLC, up 140p at 7,130p, Coca-Cola HBC, up 68p at 4,032p, and AstraZeneca, up 132p at 10,336p. The biggest fallers on the FTSE 100 were Barratt Redrow, down 11.1p at 422.7p, Berkeley Group, down 88p at 3,586p, Mondi, down 28.5p at 1,199p, Schroders, down 8p at 363p, and Airtel Africa, down 3.9p at 178.2p. Brent oil was quoted lower at 68.19 dollars a barrel late on Friday afternoon in London from 68.67 dollars late Thursday. Gold rose to 3,332.52 dollars an ounce against 3,330.30 dollars. Monday's economic calendar has a eurozone retail sales reading at 1000 BST. In the corporate diary, Ferrexpo, which produces iron ore pellets in Ukraine, releases a production report.
